Animals in the city
Foxes, rabbits, martens, sheep, parrots... the unusual animals of Paris
It is estimated that an animal or plant species disappears every twenty minutes on our planet.
Others adapt to our urban environments and sometimes thrive there, such as crows, pigeons, rats, gulls.
Behind these banal presences, more or less well tolerated, others emerge which, more surprisingly, manage to recreate fragments of wild life in the heart of Paris.
Fox cubs in the Père-Lachaise cemetery © Benoit Gallot with the kind authorization of Editions des Arènes
By: Olivier Favier Follow
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Photographs of this scene went around the world.
A naturist wandering on the banks of Lake Teufelssee in Berlin is chasing a sow who has just grabbed his bag, followed by her two pigs.
We are in the summer of 2020, between two confinements, a period where we repeat over and over again that in the absence of car traffic and thanks to a sudden slowdown in human activities, "
nature is resuming its rights”
.
In Paris, in April of the same year, it was fox cubs at the
Père-Lachaise cemetery
, photographed by the curator of the site, Benoît Gallot, who made the headlines.
The phenomenon is not new, however.
In Paris and in the adjacent woods that the city administers, there have already been around thirty couples in the mid-2010s. We are of course very far from the population in London, a much larger and more airy city.
It should be remembered that Paris is the eighth densest capital in the world - and the densest in Europe.
As far as Père-Lachaise is concerned, confinement has only accelerated and made visible a return of nature that the cessation of phytosanitary products in Parisian cemeteries in 2015 simply made possible.
For the maintenance staff, it is much more rewarding, incidentally, to use pruning shears than weedkiller.
And to bear witness to this astonishing biodiversity, Benoît Gallot became an animal photographer.
For more than three centuries, wolves have no longer entered Paris
This is how a surprising album was published in the fall of 2022 by Éditions des Arènes,
The Secret Life of a Cemetery
, where we come across pell-mell cats of course, crows, described as
"the "dominant species of the cemetery"
, hedgehogs, squirrels, woodpeckers and magpies, pigeons, jays, tits, mockingbirds - Jean-Baptiste Clément obliges - but even more surprisingly tawny owls, hawks and even more 'to
ring-necked parakeets
- legend has it that they escaped from a container at Orly airport and have since set out to conquer Paris.
One of the most beautiful images in the book is the portrait of a weasel, an animal that night owls can come across elsewhere in the twentieth arrondissement of Paris.
If during confinement, deer were filmed in the streets of Boissy-Saint-Léger, the extremely tight urban fabric on the other hand makes their incursion into Paris intramuros impossible.
The same goes for wild boars - which sometimes show up in Montmorency, less than an hour from Paris, going north.
Wolves have disappeared from Paris since the seventeenth century.
There are reports of the presence of a bear on Avenue des Gobelins in 1903. Oscar - such is his name - is not a wild animal.
He escaped from a funfair after gnawing through the bars of his cage.
Shot dead by the police, he is accused by the tabloid press of having attacked a donkey, a horse and even a courageous young man.
A more serious journalist reestablished the truth: just before dying, he was walking peacefully, enjoying his ephemeral newfound freedom.
In the seventh arrondissement, near the main entrance to Les Invalides, wild rabbits have been thriving since 2018. It is not difficult to see them wandering among the boxwoods of the French garden.
Their presence, which attracts families, irritates the authorities who would like to get rid of them.
Several prefectural decrees have, however, been overturned in court at the initiative of the PAZ association,
Paris Animaux Zoopolis
.
Reintroduce farmed animals or let nature reinvent itself?
In 2023, following a new public consultation, clearly unfavorable to the classification of these animals as harmful, the Prefecture is considering moving the populations, without having yet produced a new decree.
The species is still fragile, decimated by myxomatosis and now classified as near threatened on a national scale.
There remains the case, which has also become singular, of farm animals.
The hundreds of dairy farms that were found in Paris in the 19th century are now only a distant memory.
Animals are hardly sold on the Quai de la Mégisserie anymore.
The bird market closed at the end of 2022. The end is also near for pony rides in Paris.
“Animals are not attractions”
argues in substance the Paris Animaux Zoopolis association, emphasizing that this activity does not respect the charter in favor of animal welfare in Paris.
The town hall has therefore decided not to renew the operators' agreements when they expire in 2025.
PAZ is also concerned about the
sheep
that can be seen grazing in various gardens in the capital.
For co-founder Amandine Sanvisens, we can fear that
“these sheep are just seen as mowers, objects”
.
On several occasions, the association noted that safety conditions were insufficient, or even that the animals were dehydrated.
“This is false good environmental news that denies the animal condition,”
she says, recalling in passing that urban farms, by claiming to bring human beings closer to animals, are part of the same logic as zoos and do not hold little regard for the needs of the species.
Perhaps we would do better to follow in the footsteps of the foxes of Père-Lachaise.
Their ability to reinvent their relationship with the world could also inspire us.
Our selection on the subject
Some books :
The catalog of the “Paris animal” exhibition held at the Pavillon de l’arsenal in 2023
Benoît Gallot,
The secret life of a cemetery
, Les Arènes, 2022
Joëlle Zask,
Zoocities, wild animals in the city
, First parallel, 2020
Our “animals in the city” series:
The black crow, keen observer of human comedy
The city rat: nature and history of an unloved person
Grandeur and mystery of the city pigeon
The herring gull: a free and faithful neo-urban dweller
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